JAQM Volume 10, Issue 2 - June 30, 2015

Contents

Premature births represent a major problem of many actors implied in the subject. On one side the direct implied part: child, mother, family and on the other side public institutions enrolled to make policies necessary to prevent and treat the threatens of population. The WHO (2014) claims that every year a "estimated number of 15 million of babies are born preterm”. In Romania the preterm birth rate was estimated, in 2010, to be 7.3% according to WHO (2010) report. Even if across the world this value may be considered low, in Europe only few countries (Switzerland, Bulgaria and Slovenia) have greater values. In this case socio-demographic analysis of this problem may offer some hints to public institutions in order to take relevant measures to reduce the impact of burden.

The new technologies have become essential, thanks to the enormous possibilities that they can offer, as the immediate transfer of a document from one continent to another with just a click, saving both time and money and also allowing many simultaneous interpersonal exchanges, that considerably speed up the decision-making processes which involve numerous individuals located in various places. Moreover, we have witnessed over a very short period of time, that most of the human activities which were carried out manually have given space to much more efficient digital implementations. For instance, we can consider the serious problems that the vast documental archives have created in its management, and how centralized computer databases helped to solve most of these problems, speeding up and optimizing all research operations and data mining. This natural easiness of data exchange is still being expanded and facilitated by the development of computer networks, and in particular by the internet.

The paper investigates a sample of commercial banks that voluntarily and publicly committed to becoming promoters of sustainability in the financial industry, by applying in their regular banking activity a set of principles related to environmental and societal responsibility. To assess the individual financial profile of these banks and the similarities in terms of business behavior it has been performed several steps. First, it has been computed the descriptive statistics of key financial indicators, namely the market share, the liquidity position, the financial structure, the operational efficiency, profitability, capital adequacy and the individual contribution of each bank to the domestic financial depth. Secondly, to proxy the performance in achieving their objectives, it has been employed the Data Envelopment Analysis nonparametric technique to estimate the relative efficiency scores. Two models’ configurations have been tested, in the assumption of a financial intermediation approach and respectively profit efficiency approach. Then, to gain a comprehensive and dynamic picture, it has been computed the Malmquist productivity index in order to illustrate not only socially responsible banks’ productivity’s changes over time but also the main sources of changes, in terms of catch-up effect and technological progress.

The occurrence of road accidents in Abia State has been of a great concern to the citizens and as a result this research work has examined the Analysis of road traffic accidents’ data in Umuahia Metropolis for the period 2010 – 2013 with data collected from the State Traffic Office, Central Police Station, Umuahia. The research identified some of the problems of road accident which includes; the factors that cause the prevailing rate of road accident, the vehicle types involved in such accidents, the days in the week and the year that recorded the highest number of road accidents and inter-dependence of the nature of casualties caused by road accidents and the vehicle type involved. Analyzing and describing the data using descriptive statistics, the Friedman test, the Kruskal Wallis H test and the Chi-square test for goodness of fit and independence, it was discovered that majority of the road accidents are caused by human factors like over speeding, recklessness, drinking and driving, drug abuse, arrogance and illiteracy. Number of reported cases of road accident is not uniformly distributed across the years and vehicle types, and the casualties in road accident are dependent on the vehicle type involved.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate if there is any level of integration between the Romanian and the euro area banking markets – with focus on lending activities of monetary financial institutions (MFIs) to non-financial corporations (NFCs) – and to assess this level of integration through using both quantity- and especially price-based data. The main empirical instrument used is the Johansen cointegration test applied to pairs of interest rates for euro-denominated loans granted by MFIs located in the two markets to NFCs for different loan maturities and amounts. By employing recent data, the results of the test indicate the existence of a cointegration relationship between the interest rates for loans with floating rate / period of initial rate fixation of up to 1 year and up to and including EUR 1 million euro. These findings suggest that, although Romania is not yet part of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the two markets are not completely disintegrated especially with regard to short-term bank lending operations. Although further investigation is necessary, the findings are relevant from the perspective of Romania entering the EMU and have implications for Romanian NFCs’ access to finance.

The paper introduces an early-warning method using multiple financial crises indicators which outputs relevant alerts compared to a precise indication of crisis inception, serving as an effective tool for decision makers. By leveraging fuzzy logic techniques, we design a multi-level fuzzy decision support system based on the evolution of credit growth, housing prices and GDP gap. A neuro-fuzzy approach allows fine tuning of the individual fuzzy sub-systems towards adaptive structures which can follow the particularities of the selected indicators at the individual country level. Simulation results and implementation details are presented, along with conclusion drawn from real economic datasets.

Results from research - development and innovation sector, embodied in capital, are an undisputed factor of economic growth, included in most macroeconomic models. Drawing on the New Growth Theory that states the importance of R&D in all economic and social domains, as well as its key role in endogenous development, this paper is aiming to assess the nature and the impact of technological progress on the development of Romanian regions in recent years. We try to capture R&D’s influence on regional economic growth by means of a knowledge production function model that employs county level data for the period 2001 to 2011. Our main finding is the positive and significant, although relatively small, contribution of technical progress (as captured by R&D expenditures) to regional GDP growth in Romania. This calls for improved regional research and development strategy, able to stimulate balanced territorial distribution of R&D and innovation activities, as well as a closer link with the business sector, in order to take advantage of the economic growth potential of regional R&D activity.

This paper presents a Bayes’ classification computer application that would help biomass managers optimize their marketing decision making. Programmed in Mathematica, this decision tool would help managers understand the size of the high potential market at the US county level: number of households that would be receptive to a telemarketing / direct marketing campaign about pellet heating appliances, for example.

This conceptual article proposes a new approach for referendum quorum size calculation, based on criteria that do not take into account voters’ preferences or levels of information. Although some political commissions and plenty of past researches support the absence of a quorum in a referendum, the herein model relies on voting exogenous variables, referring some objective criteria of quorum calculation. A Mamdani fuzzy inference system is used to build a controller that yields the value of the output based on three inputs: Type, Discrepancy and Age. The results obtained through elementary simulations are of a wide range, from facilitating to obstructing the usage of a referendum depending on the context.

Principal Component Analysis is a multivariate technique which aims the reduction of the initially causal space, with a minimal loss of the variance. Using this technique I identified a very interesting aspect, subsequently confirmed too by specific methods of discriminant analysis. If before the financial crisis, companies differentiate themselves primarily by rates of profitability, now it’s obvious the increasing discriminatory power of liquidity and efficiency rates. We can also see that most companies register values under the standard parameters considered, even for a period of crisis.

This paper presents means of evaluating the quality of citizen oriented software solutions using software metrics. Highlights about citizen oriented software solutions are presented. The need of automatition is presented when dealing with a big number of informatics applications. The importance of chosing the right metrics that lead to meaningfull results when dealing with citizen oriented informatics applications is presented. A sample web based software solutions is used and the modality of getting and parsing the source code using automated tools is highlighted.